May 11, 2026

Building the future on trust, purpose, engagement, and connection

In the past, leaders were defined by their titles, and hierarchical decision-making reigned.

In the new era of leadership, Terri-Lynn Levesque, AICC chairwoman and vice president of administration at Royal Containers, devotes most of her time to instilling emotional intelligence in her team—“more of a life coach.”

“Some days, I’m more focused on driving output and problem-solving,” she says. “And there are days where I’m literally just coaching my staff if they’re having problems at home or on conflict resolution.”

Effective leaders give businesses a competitive advantage, says Matt Eichmann, founder of Catalyst Point Leadership Advisors. “If you collect more and better leaders, retain them, train them, and help them find meaning and connection, you’ll build a durable moat around your business,” he says.

Uncovering Pathways

Leadership training is a “high-impact, low-cost activity,” especially compared to huge capital expenditures on equipment and machines, Eichmann says. “You don’t have to spend millions of dollars on your coaching and your leadership development, and you can get a real outsized impact. There’s an ROI story here.”

Open, authentic communication is at the heart of leadership committed to forging relationships in the workplace. “People have to know where the company is going,” says Levesque. “They have to know what success looks like for them and for Royal. Trust-based leadership is really, really important for me, not just as a leader but as my own personal core value. Your core values of who you are as a person drive how you make decisions and how you lead your team because it’s authentic and not forced.”

While younger workers have begun to seek out more engagement in the workplace, leaders learned lessons in listening from the COVID-19 pandemic, says Scott Ellis, Ed.D., founder of Working Well, who is now retired. Things long sought by workers but deemed impossible by management—flextime, job sharing, remote work—have become the norm because “we had a whack in the head that made us do things differently and think more creatively about culture and leadership style.”

Today’s leaders are “much more involved and interactive,” Ellis says. “Now that person is in the room 90% of the time because they’ve learned how to do the no-ranks conversations.”

Leaders can spotlight growth opportunities, and promote retention, by “painting a vivid picture” of why employees should stay, Ellis says. Eichmann notes that, in a time when specialties are losing value, rotating personnel exposes them to boxmaking’s big picture and the breadth of projects underway.

Even when certain skills and pathways have a ceiling, employees can find growth pathways in mentorship, joining or leading internal committees, or making lateral shifts. One longtime Royal Container machine operator is now a top estimator, skilled at his position because he brought machine knowledge to the post, says Levesque. “Our culture is promoting from within,” she says.

Royal also empowers safe risk-taking, giving employees the space to lead meetings, speak up in public or private, and accept feedback through coaching and mentoring, Levesque says.

As boxmakers often say, corrugated is not a “sexy” industry, but today’s leaders and AICC are improving at showcasing its creativity and growth possibilities to new and potential employees, says Levesque. “It’s a really cool experience to go into retail and see a pet food display that we were working on with one of our top clients,” she says. “We’re all taking pictures and sharing them, saying, ‘Look at this cool stuff we’ve done.’”

With a laugh, she adds, “I am sure all of us at some point go into a store and look at the class stamp to see who made it. I can’t be the only crazy one?”

Royal Container promotes retention by onboarding every new employee with AICC Packaging University courses on the whys of boxmaking, industry terminology, and subjects ranging from design and customer service to leadership and continuous improvement. Each is also welcomed through assignment of a mentor for four weeks, ready to answer the most basic questions that people might hesitate to ask—“Where’s the bathroom?” “When is lunch break?”

Finding Purpose

For workers primed to seek out the next opportunity, loyalty can take a back seat to purpose and mission. Today’s younger workers want their efforts to make a difference, creating opportunities for leaders to win hearts and minds, says Eichmann. “Effective leadership requires being more collaborative, focusing more on the softer skills, and being a much better listener and communicator than perhaps it was in the past,” he says.

Purpose, Eichmann adds, “is what you bring to the world. It’s the fundamental reason for a company’s existence, and it’s up to every company to determine what that purpose is. It has to be authentic, and it can be a highly effective means of motivating and engaging employees.”

While the full impact of AI on leadership is unknown, Eichmann believes that it might elevate the value of human relationships and connections as technology takes on a greater workload. “The onus is going to be on leaders to be able to connect with their people at a much deeper level, potentially, than they did in the past,” he says.

For employees interested in eco-friendly practices, Royal Containers’ sustainability story is “an easy one to tell,” including its partnership with the Greenpac Mill in Niagara Falls, New York, and its corrugator, Tencorr Packaging, in Brampton, Ontario.

Royal broadens the definition of “sustainability,” Levesque notes, to incorporate support for employees, their families, and valued causes within the community as a way to give back. One athlete on staff competes in world-class triathlons, and Royal supports Harvest Hands, an Ontario charity that feeds homeless people.

“Kim Nelson, our president and CEO, has even sponsored my very own daughter’s hockey team over the years,” Levesque says. “We’re very actively involved in the community. That’s really important, especially to that younger generation. They want to know how we’re giving back and how we’re involved in keeping the planet running and keeping resources sustainable.”

Inclusive Atmospheres

As a young officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, Eichmann learned that titles mean little. “You’d have Marines with 20 or 25 years of experience who are calling me ‘sir.’ And yes, I might have the title, but they had the know-how. That’s when I learned that titles could be overrated and that leaders needed to be willing to humble themselves,” he says.

As leadership transitions away from hierarchies, “we’re moving from a command-and-control type of environment to one more about equity and building consensus and influence,” Eichmann adds.

Change can be operationalized when leaders engage with employees closest to production work. One effective practice is asking all personnel every week what the company should start, stop, and continue doing, he says. “They’re seeing things that management is not seeing,” he says. “They’re closest to the fight. We always get something out of it. There are some great ideas here. You do one or two of those things, and it sends a signal.”

And if the answer has to be “no,” the explanation must be authentic and real. “You can’t do everything,” says Eichmann. “You explain your thinking and the reasoning.”

Opening channels of communication to inclusion and engagement begins with showing vulnerability, says Ellis. The first step might be saying, “I don’t know the answer to this question”—not asking people to implement your solution but soliciting expertise from a diverse group and giving them the tools that help them problem-solve. “MacGyvering simplified” might be based on a fishbone or Ishikawa diagram or other exercise that structures the conversation, prevents frustration, and concludes with the satisfaction of resolving an issue.

“Everybody’s contributing, and you’re coming to a solution and some ideas about how to approach the problem,” Ellis says.

At Royal Container, plant-floor personnel have “the doghouse”—a process for sharing with administration their ideas for greater efficiency or profitability. Every submission is reviewed and the circle closed with feedback to the submitter, even if it’s an explanation of why the idea isn’t feasible.

Inclusiveness as a cultural value means creating a safe environment in which every employee feels safe speaking up, because “that’s how innovation happens,” Levesque says. “They know we listened. We took their advice.”

Adding Accountability

Accountability and adherence to strategic goals should remain enmeshed in employee expectations, but leaders can embed them within inclusive cultures—and it all goes back to communication.

“People power the mission,” says Eichmann. “The phrase is, ‘Mission first, people always.’ And while accomplishing the mission is nonnegotiable, you can never ignore the impact it may have on your folks.”

In this atmosphere, leaders walk a fine line, assessing and fine-tuning every day while setting an example of agility and uncertainty. “In a rapidly evolving and fast-paced environment, we need to teach our people the importance of simplicity and how to minimize the distractions that they face,” Eichmann says. “A tariff is on or off. You’re never going to have perfect data. But you can conduct little experiments that eventually scale over time.”

Ellis calls it “getting people to act like they own the place,” formally or informally incentivized into being productive and taking ownership of what happened, whether something went wrong or worked well, he says.

“You get everybody looking at it like, ‘How can we do better?’ instead of ‘Management’s watching you because you’re not toeing the line,’ ” he says.

Leadership Training

If Kim Nelson had not tapped Levesque for leadership training early in her career, which included AICC’s Emerging Leaders program, Levesque believes she would not be AICC chairwoman today. “You have to be able to branch out,” Levesque says. “You have to be able to network. You have to be able to make your own connections. Being involved in AICC was the most important part of that journey for me.”

Royal Containers’ portfolio of leadership training also relies on inhouse training tools, such as courses on emotional intelligence or email etiquette, customized with input collected from employees.

The key to keeping pace with leadership trends and staying effective is “just staying super curious,” says Eichmann. “Leaders ask a lot of questions and bring people together.”

And, he adds, most of the tools and information that leaders need are within their own walls. Outside coaches and consultants don’t know the business inside and out as employees do, but they can be effective at asking the right questions to surface those insights.

Progressive leaders solicit input into their leadership styles, working with peer groups and seeking out training that reveals insights into strengths, emotional intelligence, and blind spots needing attention. “The fastest way to grow your own leadership style and the team’s is to problem-solve with them,” Ellis says.

The process cultivates judgment and critical thinking in the team, expanding the potential for delegating responsibilities and finding solutions.

Accountability extends to leadership and company performance, as well. Eichmann believes in regularly opening the books and sharing key performance metrics with all personnel, “because everybody wants to know if they’re on a winning team or not.”

“How did we perform?” he says. “Are we winning? Are we losing? If we’re losing, people will have ideas about how to close the gap. If we’re winning, people will have ideas about how to double down on strengths to get more. But this starts with transparency—people need to know what the score is.”

Leadership, Eichmann adds, is built on trust and honesty.

Genuine ROI

Engagement and inclusion pay dividends, and personnel issues such as turnover and morale, once relegated to HR, have risen to the C-suite, says Ellis. While cultural change still needs to pay for itself, it is not the sole driver of policies that motivate and retain talent.

Stressing SOPs for operating machinery might play the safety card, “because that’s true, but you could also say that we want them to spend less time looking for things and more time actually doing things and making product,” Ellis says.

Still, the ROI story is real, demonstrated by improved decision velocity, better strategic focus, lower colleague turnover, and improved talent retention, says Eichmann. “If I can teach one leader to ask better questions, that gets the organization thinking better,” he says. “They’re going to have their people asking better questions. You’re going to create a more nimble, agile, and innovative firm because they’re capable of responding to customer demands or economic shifts faster. They’re sharper in that way.”

As younger workers enter the workforce, leaders are managing up to five generations in one workplace, notes Levesque. “Their knowledge of technology and AI and innovation is something we haven’t really wrapped our head around yet, but they love to just explore, and that’s what we need,” she says. “We need those explorers who are going to shape the future of the industry.”

Royal Containers’ leadership pipelines, succession plans, and mentoring encompass a broad range of people, preparing everyone from veteran machine operators to leaders for the day when someone changes roles, gets ill, or takes their tribal knowledge to another job, says Levesque.

With a leadership approach steeped in inclusion, engagement, and growth, the ROI accumulates in positioning the company to thrive and navigate a future stocked with unknowns. “It comes back to making sure that you’ve got the right culture,” says Levesque. “I’m not going to be around forever. We have to identify the leaders that are coming behind us. My success is going to be measured by how successful the generation after me is. It’s not what I can accomplish with my time at Royal Containers. It’s how well I’ve done my job to set up the third-generation and fourth-generation leaders for success. Every executive at Royal has a pipeline of leaders they are training and mentoring for the future beyond our time at Royal.”